


Not Satisfied with Embraces

by yunitsa



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Bodyswap, First Time, M/M, Missing Scene, angelic sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 07:18:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19168441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunitsa/pseuds/yunitsa
Summary: He knew that Aziraphale was thinking the same thing as him because he was – blushing, that all-over rosy hue that went beyond the physical skin, the one Crowley could no longer achieve himself even though he still felt…shame, confusion, whatever the emotion was supposed to be.





	Not Satisfied with Embraces

**Author's Note:**

> *throws up hands in despair* Look, I just hadn't come across any fic that explored the implications of the overnight bodyswap (or, indeed, of Milton) in precisely the way I wanted to see, and then: this was a thing that happened. Title from Thomas Browne's _Religio Medici_ , because I am extremely back on my bullshit.

_ ‘Love not the heavenly Spirits, and how their love _  
_ Express they? by looks only? or do they mix_  
_ Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?’_  
_ To whom the angel, with a smile that glowed_  
_Celestial rosy red, love's proper hue,_  
_Answered: ‘Let it suffice thee that thou knowest_  
_ Us happy, and without love no happiness._  
_ Whatever pure thou in the body enjoyest,_  
_ (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy_  
_ In eminence; and obstacle find none_  
_ Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars;_  
_ Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,_  
_ Total they mix, union of pure with pure_  
_ Desiring, nor restrained conveyance need,_  
_ As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.’_

\- John Milton, _Paradise Lost_

 

~

‘Nightcap?’ Crowley asked, manifesting two glasses of Aziraphale’s favourite Falernian wine, made from grapes that hadn’t grown in almost two thousand years.

‘Thank you,’ Aziraphale said, perched on the edge of his spotless leather sofa.

By unspoken consent, they had passed the bus ride into London in silence, sitting side by side in blank weariness over the day just gone. Crowley could still smell burning paper and metal and leather, and the infernal sulphur and brimstone of Satan’s breath. He’d so nearly lost – well, everything. Everything that might count as something to lose. He took a large gulp of the wine.

But it wasn’t really over after all, and so now they had to talk over Agnes Nutter’s final prophecy and what it might mean, and come up with some kind of plan. Not that plans had served them very well so far.

‘ _Ye must choose your faces wisely_ ,’ he repeated. ‘So, what: disguise ourselves? I’ve still got that nanny costume somewhere, but I doubt it’ll fool the Lords of Hell.’

‘Faces, not clothes,’ Aziraphale said, creating a coaster with a seaside scene on it and setting down his glass on the coffee table. ‘I suppose we could transform our corporations, but that won’t last two seconds in Heaven either. _Then face to face,_ you know.’ He had, in fact, always disapproved of cosmetic transformations, having not changed a hair on his own head in six thousand years. Crowley liked that about him, that Aziraphale always looked so reliably like himself. It made it easy to forget just how new this corporation of him was.  

‘D’you think,’ he ventured, suddenly glum, ‘that they’ll. You know.’ _Kill_ was a human word; it wasn’t supposed to apply to them, and he didn’t have an alternative. But Aziraphale knew what he meant.

‘There doesn’t seem to be another punishment that would serve,’ he said, ‘when I’ve caused so much trouble. And your lot, they…’

‘Holy water,’ Crowley said, ‘if they can get it, and I’m assuming they can. It’s what passes for justice down there.’

‘But it wouldn’t hurt an angel,’ Aziraphale said slowly. ‘And whatever they’ll do to me – hellfire, going by the prophecy – can’t hurt a demon. So if we.’

Crowley felt a sudden blooming of hope, following by a sharp drop of his stomach to his feet – metaphorically of course, but feeling oddly real about it – because there was only one way he knew that would get them both out of their bodies to make the switch, and it was usually intended for a very different purpose. He remembered Agnes’s book falling open to the start of another prophecy, while he was fumbling with it at the bar: _there are other fyres than myne._  

‘If we change places, you mean,’ Crowley said, as neutrally as he could. But he knew that Aziraphale was thinking the same thing as him because he was – blushing, that all-over rosy hue that went beyond the physical skin, the one Crowley could no longer achieve himself even though he still felt…shame, confusion, whatever the emotion was supposed to be. 

‘I expect,’ Aziraphale said, so quiet that he was almost inaudible, ‘that it would take – a touch.’

The two of them had touched plenty of times, of course: fingers brushing over wineglasses, shaking on an agreement, Aziraphale’s hand at the small of his back, his on Aziraphale’s elbow to steer him along. But he knew that sort of touch wasn’t what Aziraphale meant, even if something within him had still lit up with a tiny frisson every time, a longing for the impossible deeper union.

‘Right,’ Crowley said, miracled away his glass, and then found that he had nothing to do with his hands. ‘That would do it.’

Aziraphale stood up from the sofa and they faced each other. ‘Sooner rather than later, probably?’ he said uncertainly. ‘Because we don’t know…’

 _The day or the hour_. ‘Right,’ he said again. His scarf, which he kept deliberately loose in the cause of fashion, was suddenly constricting the breath he didn’t need to take. ‘So.’

‘Here?’ Aziraphale suggested, half-raising a hand to him.

It did not, strictly speaking, matter where they were, since what they were going to do would not _be_ anywhere. But, ‘The bed seems…traditional,’ Crowley forced out, and turned and – not fled, he certainly did not flee – in that direction.

His bedroom was behind a pocket door (the pocket, given the architectural layout of the flat, being in this case a dimension) and was almost entirely filled with a vast bedframe carved from granite, topped with a mattress whose foam remembered all the decadence of the late Roman empire, and covered with dark grey linen sheets of a thread-count so high that it was illegal for European import. It was so wholly comfortable that he often found himself trying to sleep on the ceiling instead.

Aziraphale had stopped just inside the doorway behind him, bending down awkwardly to remove his shoes. Crowley, being a chaotic force of darkness, kept his on, but he did take off his sunglasses and fold them neatly on the nightstand. They climbed in on opposite sides, and the bed obligingly shrank to bring them a little closer together.

They lay there staring at one another for some time, until Aziraphale, his face set with resolution, reached across to curve his palm over the edge of Crowley’s cheek. Crowley was just opening his mouth to say something – something devastatingly cool and witty, he was sure – when Aziraphale leaned across further and kissed him, light and gentle across his parted lips.

There was only that for a few minutes, the ordinary human action, as they grew accustomed to one another. And then at last Aziraphale went deeper and _kissed_ him, just as he had been yearning for, and it was not gentle at all – as the angel was good but not gentle, coming over him and into him in all the sudden blaze of his glory, overpowering at first but also utterly open, so that they might join entirely together.

It really did burn – not like hellfire but its opposite, infinitely pure and cleansing, every corpuscle of his essence touched and known and cherished and cherishing in return. Crowley could have wept, if weeping was a thing that could be done in that state. He hadn’t thought that he would ever get to have this again, this side of Paradise.

 _Do demons not love one another then?_ Aziraphale asked, picking up on the thought in distress.

Love _isn’t something we really go in for, angel. Some of them give it bash, but it’s all – squishy, and violent, and you’re liable to end up with bits missing. Not my sort of thing at all._

_But then why not..._

_Humans?_ he thought dismissively. _They’re nice enough, but there’s only three dimensions to ‘em. Four if you count time, which is_ _a whole nother problem._

 _Not the humans,_ Aziraphale said, and Crowley tried to squirm away but couldn’t, caught and held under the light of that tender, merciless regard.

 _I didn’t think you ever wanted to,_ he confessed, with a deep metaphysical shudder. _Wanted me. Even though I…_

A confused jumble of stammering and guilt and denial greeted him in response, knotted up into a snarl over the centuries. And then a single thought cutting cleanly through it, sharp and straight as a flaming sword:

 _I do want you,_ Aziraphale told him and did, all at once, _I do love you,_ and it was like a firm caress all along the length and breadth of him, making Crowley gasp and arch up into it – even though what he was opening wasn’t a mouth and what he was breathing in wasn’t air.

 _I love you too, angel_ , he said, or didn’t say, would probably never have said, only here it was enough simply to feel it, and he couldn’t help that and couldn’t even remember what it was like to try.

 _I know, my dear,_ Aziraphale thought, equally overcome, and then they were one and there was only that endless well of affection and desire, passing back and forth between them without any diminution, both wholly longing and wholly fulfilled.

~

When at last he came back to himself, he was Aziraphale and Aziraphale was him. Though that was not strictly speaking true either – it was more that they had mingled to the extent that their corporations had had to make an arbitrary distinction, and had made it in the opposite direction than usual. And even now, Crowley was finding all sorts of things inside Aziraphale that seemed familiar, that he must have dropped without missing through the centuries – as if their most casual touches had also been exchanges, even the ones that hadn’t been corporeal at all. He could see that Aziraphale was performing a similar inventory, his eyes behind the demon’s yellow ones full of wonder.

‘ _Crowley_ ,’ he said out loud – only that, and it rested heavier on him that any endearment would have done. He briefly wished that he had sunglasses to hide behind, but he didn’t need them now. And so he had to lie there and submit to the agonising pleasure of being seen in the physical realm, just as he was and wasn’t, and of looking at Aziraphale as himself in return.

‘Will it be like that when we switch back, do you think?’ Aziraphale asked tentatively at last, not allowing for the possibility that there would be no _them_ to do so.

‘Nah,’ Crowley said, trying not to show his disappointment. ‘That’ll just be everything returning to its proper places, like one of those rubber things springing back. Easy as a handshake, I should think.’

‘Oh,’ Aziraphale said, and he sounded disappointed too. He scooted forward, heat-seeking as a snake, until he could pillow his head on Crowley’s shoulder. Crowley slowly put his arms around him. He thought it would be easier, in this body that was so much more accustomed to love, but instead it was difficult in a different way. He could feel Aziraphale’s wings – both their wings, even though they were not, according to some understandings of reality, actually there – intertwining like a canopy above their heads.

‘But couldn’t we just,’ Aziraphale said after a moment, his voice muffled by the lapel of Crowley’s pale jacket, ‘couldn’t we…indulge anyway?’

If Crowley had needed a heart to beat, it would have stopped and thumped hard. He’d never understood that business the humans had, about exchanging hearts for one another’s – he’d seen it in Hell and it wasn’t pretty. But he liked it now, that the one behind his ribcage was Aziraphale’s, even though he was already looking forward to switching back and knowing precisely where all of his limbs were located. He wanted Aziraphale to kiss him again – not only on the astral plane, but in that painfully fragile, human way. They had some decent ideas, the humans – and some rather good indecent ones, too, if only as a shadow of the real thing.  

‘I do,’ he said, ‘l-like indulging. Proper demonic activity, indulgence.’

‘Angelic, too. If what you are indulging in is holy.’

Crowley wanted to hiss at that, but found that he couldn’t do it in this body: it only seemed capable of feeling a deep sense of contentment, and maybe tutting if it was truly pressed. ‘And where does tea at the Ritz fit on your holiness scale, then?’

‘Oh, dear boy,’ Aziraphale said softly. ‘I should think precisely in the middle.’

They remained like that, exhausted but not quite asleep, for some time. And so when it came they both felt it at once – an indefinable alteration in the atmosphere that made them tighten their arms and their non-existent wings unconsciously around each other. It was exactly midnight, even if it hadn’t been before, the bells ringing out all over London. Big Ben, which was closed for restoration work, confusedly found itself joining its voice to their number.

‘It’s Adam,’ Aziraphale said into his ear. ‘He’s changing things again. Fixing things.’

‘Do you think we should be worried?’ Crowley asked. He very much did not want to be worried, despite the forces of Heaven and Hell being likely to come for them very shortly. He could not, in fact, recall being less worried in all the millennia of his life.

‘No, my dear,’ Aziraphale said, bending Crowley’s own long fingers lightly around the back of his neck. ‘I rather think that all manner of things shall be well.’

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Not Satisfied with Embraces](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20548295) by [isweedan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isweedan/pseuds/isweedan)




End file.
